With
the Kosovo war, the criminal mendacity of U.S. foreign policy
seemed to have reached its limit. The lies, the venality,
the puffed-up grandiosity of our preening leaders and their
repulsive spokespersons  surely, you think, it can't
get any worse that that. But just wait until you see
what they have cooked up for us come September  a major
new offensive in the U.S.-British war on Iraq, according to
news reports. And preliminary indications are that it can
indeed get worse.

RUMORS
OF WAR

The
war on Iraq is not starting up again  because it never
stopped. Since 1991, the U.S.-British attack has been continuous,
albeit varied in its intensity, and casualties have been high.
As many as one million Iraqis, mostly children, the elderly,
and women, have been murdered by US sanctions, felled by malnutrition,
disease, and the intolerable conditions imposed by the blockade.
And also killed, in increasing numbers by the bombing raids
carried out against Iraqi cities and villages. These raids
have been stepped up, lately, as if in preparation for something
bigger  and the propaganda war is also picking up, as
witness this dispatch from the Associated Press that reads
like something out of "Ripley's Believe It Or Not."

AN
UNSUBTLE SHIFT

AP
reports that, after bombing Ba'shqua, a small town a few hundred
miles north of Baghdad, and killing two civilians, a small
child and a grandmother, "the
US military "denied responsibility for the deaths."
This is a distinct shift away from their old stance, when
Jaime Shea routinely reiterated his "regrets" over
the inability of US super-weapons to "surgically"
target specific sites  with hundreds of sorties flown
over Yugoslavia every week, and in view of the vagaries of
weather and visibility, mistakes were made. But this time
they are singing a different tune: according to Lt. Col. Mike
Waters, the Pentagon's man on the ground at Incirlik air base
in Turkey, "Saddam Hussein is killing his own people
by firing at us. If the artillery doesn't explode when it's
fired up, it will come down and explode on the ground."
Here is a new message, new evidence of Allied megalomania:
fight back and be struck down where you stand. The act of
resistance will be your last.

THE
GODS THEMSELVES

How
neat, how clean, how convenient  and how demented.
In other words, the death of those two Iraqis was due, not
to Allied bombs, but to a form of modern-day divine intervention.
In the enormity of their lies, which have taken on all the
characteristics of a full-blown delusional system, the military
and political leaders of the Allied nations have become like
those Roman emperors who imagined themselves gods; like Caligula,
who had his palace outfitted to look like Olympus, and, as
the Roman historian Suetonius tells us, occasionally "affected
a golden beard and carried Jupiter's thunderbolt, Neptune's
trident, or Mercury's serpent-twined staff. He even dressed
up as Venus and . . . wore the uniform of a triumphant general,
often embellished with the breastplate which he had stolen
from Alexander the Great's tomb at Alexandria." It is
easy to imagine Clinton as a 21st-century Caligula, but where
is our Suetonius? (And, more importantly, for those who know
their Seutonius: where is our Gaius Sabinus?)

NO
KNOWN ANTIDOTE

Colonel
Waters' explanation of how those two Iraqi civilians came
to die sounds suspiciously like that of Caligula, who, Suetonius
relates, "sent a colonel to kill young Tiberius without
warning, on the pretext that Tiberius had insulted him by
taking an antidote against poison  his breath smelled
of it." Unfortunately, there is no known antidote for
the poison of Western imperialism, which has infected the
collective brain of our ruling elites. The result is the rampaging
madness of our murderous foreign policy.

IRAQIS
COMMIT AUTO-GENOCIDE

This
time, there are no regrets. If the Iraqis are dying, it is
their own fault, not ours. The sanctions are Saddam's fault,
since he has refused to surrender. The starving children are
also Saddam's responsibility  since he is supposed to
be stealing the food and medicine and building palaces with
the proceeds of his oil money. On top of all this, we are
asked to believe that the Iraqi government is engaged in a
massive auto-genocide. This obvious lie is repeated endlessly,
hypnotically, to a mesmerized and massively indifferent American
public, which is prepared to believe anything about
Saddam. But just how long can they expect to get away with
it? When the bombs really start falling in massive numbers,
and the Iraqis have the hubris to actually fight back, are
we going to have to listen to US officials blandly declare
that "Saddam is killing his own people"?

COUNTDOWN
TO WAR

The
countdown to war begins at the mid-September meeting of the
foreign ministers of the UN Security Council member states.
Once again, Britain is the spearhead of the operation: it
is the Brits who are expected to submit a resolution that
will provide a new legal rationale for renewed military action
against Iraq. Though backed by the US, Britain is taking the
lead  politically as well as rhetorically. Just as President
George Bush has his spine "stiffened" by the harpy
Thatcher, so Clinton is being continually hectored into action
by Blair and the British Foreign Office. This is a development
that no doubt pleases the "Atlanticist" conservative
intellectuals who surround George Dubya, but the conservative
grassroots have to ask: is the US military now taking its
marching orders from Number 10 Downing Street  and is
this what they mean by "NATO expansion"?

WHOM
THE GODS
WOULD DESTROY . . .

Much
has been written about the psychological effects of war on
the defeated, and on those who actually have to live under
the daily threat of sudden death. I believe the psychologists
when they say that these people will bear the scars of their
experience through all the days of their lives. But there
is another aspect of this question, and that is the effect
on the victors: the conquered are humbled, humiliated,
and enslaved. But what of the alleged "conquerors"?
What is needed is a medical study of the mind-numbing effect
of war propaganda on the nation's mental health. It may turn
out that the psychological scars of "victory" are
less terrible, yet uniquely torturous. For once again we face
the horrible prospect of having to hear Tony Blair's shrill
pontifications on behalf of this no doubt oh-so-"progressive"
war. And that is enough to drive anyone mad.

UNDER
PRESSURE

The
first hard news of pending military action against Iraq 
an Agence
France Presse dispatch which we linked to from this site
 is written in an oblique and even mysterious style.
It quotes a nameless Western diplomat "well acquainted
with Iraqi affairs" who warns that the British resolution,
if adopted, "will provide the United States and Britain
with a new legal tool to take measures against Iraq. Pressure
is rising in the United States to impose a deadline on Iraq
to meet conditions set by the United Nations, after which
Washington must act." The diplomat went on to state,
with an air of considerable authority, that "the US administration
is under pressure to act quickly with only six months left
before the start in earnest of the US presidential election
campaign." Under pressure  from whom?

WARMONGERS
UNITE

Desert
Storm II is brought to you by the same bipartisan cabal of
politicians, profiteers, and ideologues that hailed President
George Bush's crusade for a "New World Order." Fresh
from their great "victory" in Kosovo, where the
last of the Serb civilians are being hunted down and expelled,
the NATO-crats are now setting their sights on Baghdad. And
while there was some dissent in ruling circles about the wisdom
of Bill and Tony's Excellent Adventure, there is unity on
the question of war with Iraq. The war-loving "progressives"
of the Blairite Left and the war-crazed Tories in England
and America, the Democrats and the Republicans, the oil companies
and the arms industry, the foreign lobbyists and their American
fifth column  soon they'll all be clamoring for the
Allies to "finish the job." Will we wake up one
morning, some day soon, to find that US troops are in the
middle of Iraq, fighting alongside the British on the road
to Baghdad? The only question is: when?

A
CALL TO ARMS

Under
these circumstances, it is necessary for the antiwar movement
to once again rev up its reluctant motor  or motors
 and swing into action. Literally, that is what is needed
 not editorials, articles, "links," and cyber-talk,
but action to stop this war before it starts. The fate
of thousands of Iraqis is in your hands. Americans, and West
Europeans, as residents of the aggressor nations (or, rather,
subjects of the aggressor governments), have a particular
moral responsibility to act before it is too late. In the
days before the foreign ministers' meeting, the first two
weeks of September, a visible and vocal protest of an exemplary
nature is called for. We may not be able, as yet, to mobilize
great numbers, but what is important is the visibility
of these actions. We must raise the issue of Iraq,
before our elected officials, and in public forums, oppose
the war plans of this administration, and expose the criminal
sanctions that are killing Iraqi children. Whatever the crimes
of Saddam Hussein, he will have to answer to his own people,
and to history, not to some judicial or political authority
acting in the name of a "New World Order." Our concern
is with the crimes of our own governments, who bomb and starve
children in the name of "international law" 
and use war as a rationale to expand their own power over
our lives.

A
SAN FRANCISCO ACTION

As
one of the most cravenly loyal Democrats in Congress, San
Francisco Democrat Nancy Pelosi slavishly followed the Clintonian
line on Kosovo, and is sure to back any action in the Gulf,
just as she has in the past. How is it possible that in San
Francisco, that supposedly anti-war leftist's paradise, Pelosi
is allowed to get away with being one of the biggest warmongers
in Congress? It's a mystery to me, but one theory is that
San Francisco leftists give her a free pass because she is
so politically correct on other issues. The proof of this
will be the response to the call of the San Francisco Antiwar
Action Group to intervene at a public meeting called by Rep.
Pelosi, on Saturday, September 18, from 10:00 a.m. to Noon.
The meeting will be at the Herbst International Exhibition
Hall, between Montgomery and Moraga Streets, above the Main
Post in the Presidio. Call her office (415-556-4862) for directions.
Now is the time for Left and Right to unite and fight against
the Clintonian war machine before it starts raining mass death
on Iraq.

MAKE
PELOSI ANSWER

This
is a rare public appearance for Pelosi: she almost never faces
her constituency, and her bugged-out eyes practically pop
out of her head in panic whenever she is confronted by them
in large numbers. And that's what we need: large numbers of
people who want to know how she can be so concerned about
"Livable Communities"  the ostensible subject
of this meeting  and support Clinton as he makes whole
countries  Serbia, Kosovo, Iraq  unlivable. Give
me a break! Let her answer to her constituents for her complicity
in Clinton's crimes  if she can. Click
here if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and want to
get involved. If you live elsewhere, click
here to send her an email.

COME
ON, YOU GUYS  GET BUSY!

Come
on, all you San Francisco lefties, Commies and concerned "liberals"
alike  and all you libertarians out there  wake
up and let's get busy. We have to start exposing this
one before it starts.